Donate SIGN UP

Technical question about slow-mo filmed voice synchs

Avatar Image
Will__ | 01:11 Thu 04th Mar 2004 | Music
3 Answers
In music videos, when the scene is in slow-motion, as many are, how do they maintain the mouth movement synch to the vocals?
If I had to guess, never having seen how it's done, I'd say they would first speed up the audio track by the same value as the slow-mo video is planned (ie if the slow mo is planned for 66% of normal speed, they would resample the audio to be 133% of normal speed. I'm useless at maths so this second percentage is probably wrong - what's the right one?)
This real-time mouth movement on video, (mouthed too fast in real time as the sped-up audio is played while filming), when slowed down would thus match the normal speed vocal track.
Or maybe I should just get out more?
This question came to me while watching Gwen Stefani in her new cover of Talk Talk's 'It's My Life' which actually has really grown on me. Although I can't say that I spent the whole of the video watching her mouth./
On a separate but related note, I presume that when filming reverse motion music videos, the actor/singer simply has to learn the entire mouth movement backwards? That might be a little obvious but since I imagine it's near impossible to do for more than a few seconds at a time, I thought they might have a technical trick or workaround. And I seem to remember a Coldplay video shown entirely in reverse motion involving Chris Martin in a car crash but I can't remember if it's several long takes or chopped up so he can learn the mouth movements.
Hmph. Longest post here for me!
cheers
  
Gravatar

Answers

1 to 3 of 3rss feed

Best Answer

No best answer has yet been selected by Will__. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.

For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.
Right on both counts. They're both very difficult to do and require a lot of work on the artist's behalf. Classic examples of these techniques are 'No Surprises' by Radiohead for the speed up (the bit in the middle where Thom gets submerged - get hold of a copy of 'meeting people is easy' to see how it's done) and the Pharcyde's 'Drop' for the backwards thing (it's on the 'Work of Spike Jonze' DVD and is an absolute masterpiece). Hope this helps...
Question Author
cool. Thanks for your reply.
bigred is spot on. artists really need to be perfectly on the beat with the lyrics as it shows more-so than normal when slowed down to 'regular' audio speed.

1 to 3 of 3rss feed

Do you know the answer?

Technical question about slow-mo filmed voice synchs

Answer Question >>

Related Questions

Sorry, we can't find any related questions. Try using the search bar at the top of the page to search for some keywords, or choose a topic and submit your own question.